Having nothing new to say is usually the fastest way to obscurity. That is not the case with the release Monday of the final report into Malaysia Flight 370, the Boeing 777 that disappeared along with 239 people on a flight to Beijing four and a half years ago. It took the Malaysian air accident investigators 400 plus pages to conclude it is “unable to determine the real cause” of the accident. There are however, shards of new information in the report. These buttress the theory that the loss of this airplane was due to the not-unprecedented problem of pilot incapacitation due to oxygen starvation…. Read More…
http:// What a flight! Made it!! Still here!! #southwest #flight1380 pic.twitter.com/Cx2mqoXVzY — Joe Marcus (@joeasaprap) April 17, 2018 A woman on a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas died after being partially sucked out of the window of the Boeing 737 on Tuesday morning. A failure in the left engine triggered a rapid decompression of the aircraft cabin. The woman’s father, Todd Baur, told a reporter that other passengers pulled his daughter back into the aircraft. But she later died from her injuries. In a video posted on Facebook, passenger Marty Martinez who was seated a few seats away from Baur’s daughter… Read More…
The Washington Post tagged a story on Donald Trump’s first days as U.S. President with the alarming proclamation that he was “blocking regulations, including one to prevent plane crashes.” Without wading into the morass that is federal politics in America these days, let’s just be clear about what Trump actually did. Shortly after taking office Friday, Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, ordered a number of government agencies to withdraw proposed rules from publication in the federal register, the last stop before the “proposed” comes off and the rule becomes law. From the Department of Housing to the Interior Department, senior lawyers must have worked through the… Read More…
The story making headlines on the anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 is the news that the battery for the locator beacon in the plane’s flight data recorder was not changed on schedule as it should have been. This raises the possibility that one of the plane’s two black boxes may not have been emitting an audible signal for searchers to have picked up. Failing to replace a dying battery and the consequences of such a lapse is a scenario everyone can relate to, which is why this particular revelation is big news, even though it is exceedingly unlikely that the towed pinger locator was ever within a… Read More…
